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As for the disregard of desert- the good afflicted, the
unworthy thriving- it is a sound explanation no doubt that to the
good nothing is evil and to the evil nothing can be good: still
the question remains why should what essentially offends our
nature fall to the good while the wicked enjoy all it demands?
How can such an allotment be approved?
No doubt since pleasant conditions add nothing to true happiness
and the unpleasant do not lessen the evil in the wicked, the
conditions matter little: as well complain that a good man
happens to be ugly and a bad man handsome.
Still, under such a dispensation, there would surely be a
propriety, a reasonableness, a regard to merit which, as things
are, do not appear, though this would certainly be in keeping
with the noblest Providence: even though external conditions do
not affect a man's hold upon good or evil, none the less it would
seem utterly unfitting that the bad should be the masters, be
sovereign in the state, while honourable men are slaves: a wicked
ruler may commit the most lawless acts; and in war the worst men
have a free hand and perpetrate every kind of crime against their
prisoners.
We are forced to ask how such things can be, under a Providence.
Certainly a maker must consider his work as a whole, but none the
less he should see to the due ordering of all the parts,
especially when these parts have Soul, that is, are Living and
Reasoning Beings: the Providence must reach to all the details;
its functioning must consist in neglecting no point.
Holding, therefore, as we do, despite all, that the Universe lies
under an Intellectual Principle whose power has touched every
existent, we cannot be absolved from the attempt to show in what
way the detail of this sphere is just.
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